You are absolutely correct; but if you pixel-peep, it's easy to mislead yourself / misunderstand what you're looking at and "see more noise". That's a prime ex

You are absolutely correct; but if you pixel-peep, it's easy to mislead yourself / misunderstand what you're looking at and "see more noise". That's a prime example how Ken's logic sounds intuitively correct but is technically incorrect and will lead you down the wrong path. Mind you, nothing wrong with d40; it was my first DSLR too and I loved it to death; also, back then, there WAS some additional noise due to additional electronics between 6mp and 10mp which meant that less light actually reached the sensor, so he wasn't completely wrong :) Unfortunately, that misconception caused much rage throughout the decade, for example when Nikon released d800, which was 36MP compared to it's beloved predecessor d700 12MP. Internet went bananas on "where's our low light camera". To this day, there are people who firmly believe d700 had "better low light". (I've owned and used both side by side professionally and while I loved my d700 and enjoyed couple of UI/UX choices better, there's no comparison; d800 has better images, period).